You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. How do you deal with other people's views of you? What do other people think of you? Sometimes not well. Sometimes I let it get to me and I take on exactly what you said. You mean they've got their insecurities, their problems and they just want you to be miserable too. And so, when they come up, I just try to look at it as an observer, right? As opposed to taking it personally because people are going to do it all the time and they do it all the time, but you don't take on their baggage, you process it. Take two seconds to go. This is not something I need to do or take on and then I put it away because man, it just gets after and after and after you. So it's a process.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Is it true that you cut the cards in your living room for the first thousand games? Is that a true story? Yes close. So we did a thousand games was our test market and we had some assembled them by hand. Well, the one problem we had was just before our launch, the printer screwed up and sent us the wrong cards. And they were 500 cards per game at a thousand games. With 500000 cards when they were supposed to come sorted game a game of 500 cards, they came completely wrong. So we had to hand sort.... you're laughing man. It was like oh! I thought it was I have admitted. It's the only tantrum I ever threw. I mean, the printer calls me up. Can't get it done. I launched the phone but we had to figure it out and it would be like and the math is 9580 playing card decks of playing cards.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, I tried other jobs selling, buying a pizza franchise, selling real estate, and selling vacuums door-to-door. So I was doing all that, but I hadn't started a product and built a business and so this was eventually, when I started, it was the first shot but I kind of knew deep down. It was the right shot to take. But yeah, so but so I'm thinking of the idea or excuse me I graduate from college and move in with some buddies and it's 1982. I'm 22 years old and we start sketching words out of the dictionary. That was it. I mean there was no grand plan. There was no game. We're just having fun. Well, we get home late. Now there are three guys, six guys were just playing this silly game. We were having a ball every night. And so the entrepreneurial spirit started kicking in. I'm going you know this is going to be a good board game because in 82 there were no video games. Everybody played board games. So that was the vernacular of the day. And then, of course, I procrastinated for three years. Are you ready to go, man? I'm good. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm gonna be, you know, I went to Europe. I kept waiting tables. I wasn't ready and I just couldn't get out of my way.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I love business. I love making money. I love the journey and the path of creating excellence in the world and creating cool products. I've been doing it for a good part of 30 years now I feel old. But since I was 15, I've been creating products that people take and enjoy and at the end of the day, I realized the commonality between myself and a lot of my friends that are also successful and the fact is that at the end of the day they don't take themselves so seriously.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, one of the interesting things that I think most people don't understand is that you don't have to be a graphic designer to have great art. Similarly, with technology, you just need to be able to hire specialized knowledge. There are lots of people smarter than me who know how to do engineering, who know how to build the parts of the device, and one of the things now I'm looking at this, which is super interesting, which I don't know if they're doing now is that I made sure that none of the parts of this device that we built came in touch with the plastic components of it because I didn't believe in heating the plastic. So if you look inside the device this is all-ceramic. So we built ceramic. There's glass, there's steel inside here. I'm going through this, so I'm looking at this. I'm like dude, I did a great job building this thing. It was a nice device to build but you can hire people, so anytime you want to build anything there are people out there nerds who live on that technology kind of thing and they'd love to do that without burning yet.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Cash flow positive real estate. I know you're in Canada. Canada is in a boom right now with real estate. Yeah, but you need to learn about real estate and get some involvement, some exposure. To real estate, that's producing cash flow. People will always need shelter, always need shelters like food and water. People will always need shelter and you in the long term will create wealth doing that.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Every day I'm in mindfulness mode except for the days that I'm in mindlessness mode. As Alan Watts would carefully observe that sometimes we need to lose our minds to find ourselves. So, I'm a big fan of that as I'm a big fan of Alan Watts.

When the decision is made, the doing becomes effortless. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that once you become resigned to achieving the results that you want to achieve and you decide that you are willing, you don't might not have to do it but that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, very little can stop you. Sure, if you die, get hit by a truck or something, maybe. Outside of that, I wasn't willing to take no for an answer and there was zero indication if you saw it in my face that I wasn't willing able or interested in doing the impossible.

We talk about in my book Billion, how I became king of the throw pill cult - a three-step plan, which feeds in nicely to this and it's something a friend of mine Wayne Boss taught us, which is knowledge, courage, and action. When you are faced with a problem, a challenge, a project that needs to be undertaken, you need to know. Knowledge can be bought, knowledge can be borrowed, knowledge can be stolen, knowledge can be rented. Okay, in my case, I went out there, I rented it, I talked to people. I didn't have money, but I convinced them to give me that knowledge.

I don't think there's any key ingredient. I don't think there's anyone thing, you got to have grit, you got to have resilience, you got to be able, the one thing I would say that's key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches, you got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my amazon fba seller course, the people who come through my amazon mastery course. The ones that come in with the attitude of hey, I'm going to throw my chips on the table and I'm gonna see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it'll land on one of my numbers, those are the ones that fail. I haven't had anybody fail yet by the way.

And the one thing that I learned Bart from all of this and I think this is going to answer your question is that the markets are not based on much more than one thing and that element is human emotion. The markets are moved by emotion and they are not reasonable or logical. If they were reasonable or logical we would all figure it out. We would be like Jim Simmons who runs renaissance funds, who's one of the most intelligent guys I've ever heard of, who's got a fund that allegedly you know has never failed and made money year after year and you know he's one of the masters of quant trading. If you're not one of those guys and there's maybe a handful of those guys on the planet.

They could fail because they get pulled off the platform for violating service. There's a lot of great stories of 10-20000 a day and they just get canceled, just like what happened 15 years ago with the search engines. I knew people getting checks for five and ten thousand dollars from AdSense and all of a sudden they changed the algorithms panda slap in SEO terms and those checks stopped. So so I mean one small change or one small violation could end the business. That's probably how most of them lose because it doesn't cost anything to stay there. You just may not be number one and your sales will decrease.

The fact is that on amazon they want you to know very carefully very, keenly that you are playing in the big boy sandbox. That sandbox is not yours, it is theirs and they will not hesitate to slap you with a suspension if you violate their terms of service or even if you don't. Maybe you have a competitor that doesn't like you, maybe somebody wants to take up your market share, this happens all the time on Amazon and they will slap you with a fake copyright infringement.

You know it is as it goes from blue ocean to red ocean right one of the terms we use to kind of describe things you have to constantly be refining and a lot of people I mean think like much like yourself feel alone going at it. Alone because they’re in there and they’re like man amazon’s not answering my calls. I just get some dude in India you know. The phone keeps getting disconnected because Amazon doesn’t really care about you as a seller is the first dirty secret of amazon.

And the students that I have the ones that I can tell are going to succeed are the ones who don’t look at it like it’s a roulette table right. They don’t think like hey, I threw the little ball in the thing and it went around and landed on my number right. They look at it as I’m gonna hit this nail in the head until it goes in and if the hammer doesn’t work, I’m gonna use a sledgehammer. If that doesn’t work I’m gonna use a rock. Whatever it takes, I’m gonna get it done. Those are the guys that that make it.

That’s cash flow positive real estate, great. More wealth is built in this country by real estate than than pretty much anything else right. You should have one one area of your business that’s you know in the stock market and then another area that pays you to work you know. If you’re still in the business of selling your hours which I know a lot of us have gotten out of but if you’re doing that and that’s the money that you’re bringing in for your rent, your family whatever that’s respectable. But you have those pillars.

But as far as just you know entrepreneurship and business goes I mean like they say you know if there’s blood in the street buy real estate. Dude, there was blood in the street and a lot a lot of wealth was created and now like we’re in l.a like everything’s open. People aren’t wearing masks and stuff and you’re looking around and I’m like people are back to buying 7.50 lattes on the corner here and like it’s almost like nothing changed

That the the first thing we tell people is don’t come to the table with an idea the best thing the best students the ones that succeed the most is the ones that have no idea what they’re going to sell and I’ll tell you why. Because by the way we don’t we don’t believe in building a better mousetrap and the world will beat its way to your door. That’s the old model right. That’s disruption marketing with.

I don’t have one of these big courses and I’m not one of these dudes that’s like check out my lambo check out like the babes in my yacht and like my mega mansions and like all that right. We I do this for a living. We make millions of dollars a year selling on amazon. It’s well documented. I’m many times over a millionaire. I no longer need the money but I do it because I like empowering people.

Because we have grit that’s the thing. If you look at Iranians, Armenians, Koreans you know Chinese and anybody that comes to this country as an immigrant, you know life is very different outside of the united states and where I came from Iran even though I was very young when I left there we would leave home as a five-year-old and I’d be running with a little five-year-old gang of kids and we’d be doing all kinds of stuff.